With busy schedules and multiple tasks to do in a day, fitness enthusiasts these days may find it difficult to bring dedicated workouts into their day-to-day lives. Now, one could try and solve the problem by fixing a time during the day, but Arnold Schwarzenegger prefers to remain flexible.
In his recent newsletter, he highlighted how sticking to a schedule may turn counterproductive for fitness goals. With the help of some research, he revealed how being adaptive to various situations could provide better results.
Consistency is the key to sustaining any habit, particularly in the case of fitness goals that need long-term commitments. Schwarzenegger has often spoken about maintaining consistency with the help of various tricks. In this case, he revealed a study that wanted to find out the link between rigidity in a routine and the chances of it being successful.
About 2,500 Google employees had to include a workout plan in their daily routine but split into three groups. One acted as the strict group that had to dedicate a fixed 2-hour window for exercise. The other was given a flexible option to include their workout plan at any time of the day.
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Both these groups received payment as an incentive to complete their workouts for the day and ensure even results. However, a third control group was simply encouraged to exercise without payment. After four weeks, the researchers stopped the payments to see who would continue working out.
“Those who took a more flexible approach to their exercise routine were twice as likely to continue going to the gym as those who trained themselves to only exercise at a specific time.”
This happened because flexibility gave them more room to tweak and modify their daily schedule in case life happened. But those who stuck to a rigid routine failed since they didn’t account for changes in real life, even though they built a workout habit earlier.
“This might seem counterintuitive, but if you’ve followed a plan religiously for a few weeks and then fell off the wagon and never got back on, then the experience is quite familiar…”
In real life, people may often resort to fixing a particular time of the day to exercise and develop a habit of it successfully. But Schwarzenegger understood and insisted that life always brought changes, and unless one could adapt and improvise in such situations, one might find it tough to cultivate a long-term routine. A flexible plan for both exercise and nutrition helps individuals live more freely and stay healthier.
Arnold Schwarzenegger once admitted that discomfort would always find its way
Schwarzenegger has always made sure to be realistic in his approach when guiding fitness enthusiasts in their desired journey. He designed the exercise application, ‘The Pump’ for people who could benefit from sticking to a routine and cultivating a healthy habit of working out. However, things went south when his ‘village’ began critiquing this feature since it didn’t leave room for flexibility.
He explained that while it is essential to form habits and follow a routine, life will always be in the way. The only solution to not deter from the path was to accept the discomfort of failures, both in life and in the application. Since people primarily complained of feeling demotivated about seeing red marks for failure to work, Schwarzenegger advised that they need to see the bigger picture and let that drive them to success.
